Olivia Rees (b. 1990, Carmarthen, Wales) is a Belfast-based visual artist working across sculpture and installation. Her practice examines how nature is constructed, aestheticised, and consumed within contemporary visual culture. Through material experimentation and processes of accumulation, staging, and spatial composition, she creates installations that blur distinctions between the organic and synthetic, the seductive and the excessive.
Drawing on still life traditions, commercial display aesthetics, and mediated representations of food and nature, Rees investigates how contemporary culture transforms natural forms into surfaces, images, and commodities. Industrial materials, artificial textures, and carefully orchestrated arrangements produce environments that appear simultaneously familiar and unstable, oscillating between attraction and discomfort. Her work often considers how systems of consumption shape our relationship to the natural world, revealing tensions between abundance, artificiality, and ecological anxiety.
In 2022, Olivia was awarded the Porthleven Prize, which included a residency at the Lifeboat Studio in Cornwall. This residency culminated in ‘Origins’, exhibited at the Fishbowl Gallery in Falmouth and the Michael Pennie Gallery in Bath. The same year, she completed a research residency at the La Meridiana School of Ceramics in Italy.
Since graduating with First-Class Honours in Contemporary Arts Practice from Bath School of Art in 2023, Rees has exhibited across the UK, including in London, Bath, and Wales
Olivia Rees | Visual Artist 